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Imagine that you are being chased. You are speeding on a busy road trying to escape a maniac who for whatever reason decided that you were going to be their victim today. Your heart is beating fast, your eyes are hyper focused on the road, and your digestive system shuts down, leaving your mouth as dry as the Sahara. Finally, you see a cop car and flag them down. The carjacker that was tailing you blows past you and you are safe and sound. The stress is over, and your sympathetic nervous system relaxes and takes a back seat to your parasympathetic nervous system.
This biological shift is normal and life-saving, as it directs all of your body’s resources towards keeping you alive when faced with a threat. This stress response can become problematic however when we are stressed ALL OF THE TIME. For many people, constant stress is a trigger for emotional eating. If you are one of these people, then keep reading to find out why stress can lead to emotional eating and why cutting calories is ineffective for losing weight if you’re an emotional eater. At the end, I will also include some tips for effectively combating emotional eating.
Who experiences emotional eating?
When you hear the words emotional eater, you probably imagine a tearful woman eating ice cream all alone.
Women are more likely to emotionally eat, but men do it too.
Binge eating is often intertwined with emotional eating, and is commonly seen in people who are at an unhealthy weight, like Tammy from 1000-lb sisters. However, keep in mind that not every person who feels trapped by emotional eating is overweight. Many people who appear to have a healthy relationship with food are actually struggling in silence, like Patty from Insatiable. But, what is really happening when we emotionally eat?
Let’s do a quick overview of the stress response
When you experience something stressful, the sympathetic nervous system takes over and triggers the “fight-or-flight response.” This signals the adrenal glands to release adrenaline (aka epinephrine). This in turn causes the heart to beat more rapidly in order to provide more oxygenated blood to the body, the lungs to become more efficient at taking up oxygen, the senses to sharpen, and blood sugar to rise. Stress also activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. When this happens, the hypothalamus in the brain sends a signal to the pituitary gland – also part of the brain – who then sends a different signal to the adrenal glands sitting down below on the kidneys, who complete the chain by releasing the last signal. This signal is cortisol, the infamous “stress hormone.”
This response is helpful in threatening situations, but issues arise when the stress is constant. Waking up after a restless night, drudging through a work day at a job you despise, and coming home to a discordant family situation are just a few things that can cause incessant stress. Constant stress keeps cortisol levels high, and this basically throws your physiology out of whack, causing high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and other negative side effects.
But, why does stress lead to emotional eating?
Well, stressors activate the neural stress-response network. This provokes a rise in cortisol and insulin, and these and other hormones act in areas of the brain such as the amygdalae that are important for forming memories. Remember, short term stress causes digestion to shut down. It is only when we face repeated stress that we learn to taper down with food that our brains begin to associate stress with eating. By repeatedly engaging in this behavior, we basically override the normal physiological response such that eating comfort food after a tough day at work becomes an automatic behavior.
Eating when we are stressed is a learned behavior that becomes more deeply ingrained in our brains each time we execute the behavior.
Stress also causes increased emotional activity and reduced executive function in the brain. In other words, stress causes your brain to enter default mode and shut down conscious decision mode. This redirection is reinforced every time we reach for ice cream to calm our anxiety.
There are layers to this problem – relying primarily on emotional eating to handle difficult feelings can lead to increased fat around your abdomen, but beyond that, the problem that caused you to emotionally eat in the first place never goes away. We’ve all been there – you think that a few fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies will be the thing to lift your spirits, but it never truly works. You don’t actually consciously cope with the problem, so it stays there and continues to hurt you.
Here's another con: eating when you aren’t actually hungry can shorten your lifespan - in theory. Studies that have been done in animals point to caloric restriction (not starvation, to be clear) being a key to longevity, so overeating may be masking your feelings and keeping you from having more birthdays.
Is it possible to rewire the brain to stop wanting these foods when we feel stressed?
A part of your brain called the nuclei accumbens plays a role in the motivation to carry out certain behaviors, and this motivation can happen at one of two levels – the automatic level via the basal ganglia, or the conscious level through the prefrontal cortex. Actually learning how to pause and reassess feelings can increase activity in the prefrontal cortex pathway and inhibit the amygdala pathway. This favors more conscious decision making and potentially, better decisions around food.
This paper explores the causes of emotional eating. The authors identified 6 key factors which often lead to emotional eating which go beyond the stress response that I described earlier. These factors are:
Dieting
Poor interoceptive awareness, which is the ability to identify, understand, and respond to internal biological cues
Confusion of hunger/satiety cues with emotions
Alexithymia, which is the inability to recognize/describe one’s own emotions
Reversed stress response of the HPA (hypothalamic pituitary adrenal) axis due to adaptive downregulation – basically learning to associate food with stress over time
Genetic predisposition, for example, certain variations in the dopamine D2 receptor gene (DRD2) and the serotonin transporter (5-HTT) gene (SLC6A4)
As you can see, emotional eating can be a pretty complicated thing. Nevertheless, the solution is not cutting calories or going on the keto diet – the key is to focus on improving emotional recognition, awareness, and regulation.
How do we do this?
The authors wrote that dialectical behavior therapy, often referred to as DBT, and enhancing mindfulness have both been shown to be effective.
The goal of these therapies is to replace automatic thoughts and behaviors with more conscious, healthier ones.
Several studies have been done to assess the effectiveness of mindfulness-based therapies on emotional eating and weight management. In this review of 14 studies, the authors concluded that “mindfulness meditation effectively decreases binge eating and emotional eating.” However, the findings regarding weight loss were mixed. Considering that many of these studies lasted around 2 months give or take, I would hypothesize that longer interventions may be needed to see significant weight loss if that is what is desired. This study that came out after the review had a follow-up period of 6 months, and the researchers did observe greater odds of weight loss in people who succeeded in reducing emotional eating. Of course, more research is needed.
What about other behavioral factors that can affect emotional eating?
In this 7-year study of about 4000 Finns, researchers found that depression, exercise, and sleep can also affect emotional eating. Depression was found to be strongly linked to emotional eating and increased BMI and waist circumference over time. Higher physical activity was linked to less emotional eating, and the link between emotional eating and BMI was lessened in people with high activity levels. Lastly, in people who did not sleep enough, emotional eating was more strongly tied to weight gain. People who got <9 hours of sleep each night had a greater chance of gaining weight because of emotional eating. How much sleep a person needs varies, but the point here is that sleep deprivation can make it more likely that you will end up with unwanted weight gain due to emotional eating.
So, what are the main takeaways here?
If you have been stuck in a cycle of emotional eating for months or even years, you don’t need to go on a diet. The first thing you need to do is focus on what is driving you to eat this way.
What difficult emotions are you using food to bury deep within you?
When did you learn to use food as an emotional crutch?
When do you notice yourself falling into this pattern – is it when you are around specific people, or in particular situations?
Mindfulness can be cultivated with practice, and getting the help of a therapist could be useful as well if you want someone to guide you on your healing journey. Something that has been useful for me when I feel the urge to emotionally eat, is pausing for 5-10 minutes. Just waiting a little bit before you get a second helping of food or head out to the ice cream shop can be a very effective strategy, and it comes back to being mindful and being connected with what you are actually feeling. When you pause, you give yourself a chance to reassess the situation and decide of food is really when you need in that moment.
My other personal tip is to focus on gratitude. I know that this sounds corny, but I really think that there’s something to it. I like watching Japanese cooking channels, and I noticed that in many of the videos before sitting down to eat, they would say “Itadakimasu.”
If you like anime, you have probably heard this word said quite often as well.
This word translates to “I humbly receive,” and from what I could gather from random websites and videos, it is a demonstration of gratitude that can extend to all beings involved in the meal – including the animal whose life was taken, the farmer, the grocery store owner, and the cook. Stopping to think about all that it takes for that plate of food to appear before you can help you to feel more appreciative. Again, it’s about pausing and being mindful of the experience of eating. Once you are able to better differentiate between emotions and hunger cues, confront difficult emotions, and rewire your brain to go down a more conscious path of thinking, you will likely see a change in your habits. Remember to be patient with yourself.
If you learned anything new or think that someone you care about could benefit from this information, share this article, and subscribe to the blog for regular updates on commonly asked nutrition questions.
Enjoy today!
References:
Understanding the stress response:
Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, February 20). Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothalamic%E2%80%93pituitary%E2%80%93adrenal_axis
Harvard Health Publishing. (2020, July 6). Understanding the Stress Response. Harvard Health; Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response
Stress, emotional regulation, and weight:
Dallman MF. Stress-induced obesity and the emotional nervous system. Trends Endocrinol Metab. 2010 Mar;21(3):159-65. doi: 10.1016/j.tem.2009.10.004. Epub 2009 Nov 18. PMID: 19926299; PMCID: PMC2831158. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19926299/
van Strien T. Causes of Emotional Eating and Matched Treatment of Obesity. Curr Diab Rep. 2018 Apr 25;18(6):35. doi: 10.1007/s11892-018-1000-x. PMID: 29696418; PMCID: PMC5918520.
What’s mindfulness?
Bishop, S. R., Lau, M. A., Shapiro, S. L., Carlson, L. E., Anderson, N. D., Carmody, J. F., et al. (2004). Mindfulness: A proposed operational denition. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11, 230–241
Studies on mindfulness-based therapies, emotional eating, and weight management:
Katterman SN, Kleinman BM, Hood MM, Nackers LM, Corsica JA. Mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, and weight loss: a systematic review. Eat Behav. 2014 Apr;15(2):197-204. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2014.01.005. Epub 2014 Feb 1. PMID: 24854804.
Braden A, Flatt SW, Boutelle KN, Strong D, Sherwood NE, Rock CL. Emotional eating is associated with weight loss success among adults enrolled in a weight loss program. J Behav Med. 2016 Aug;39(4):727-32. doi: 10.1007/s10865-016-9728-8. Epub 2016 Mar 1. PMID: 26931635; PMCID: PMC5300743.
Research on other behavioral factors that impact emotional eating:
Konttinen H, van Strien T, Männistö S, Jousilahti P, Haukkala A. Depression, emotional eating and long-term weight changes: a population-based prospective study. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act. 2019 Mar 20;16(1):28. doi: 10.1186/s12966-019-0791-8. PMID: 30894189; PMCID: PMC6427874.
Caloric restriction and longevity:
Green CL, Lamming DW, Fontana L. Molecular mechanisms of dietary restriction promoting health and longevity. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2022 Jan;23(1):56-73. doi: 10.1038/s41580-021-00411-4. Epub 2021 Sep 13. PMID: 34518687; PMCID: PMC8692439.
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